I am writing this on a Saturday evening in London. I am wrapped up in two blankets and wearing several layers of pajamas. It is January and the city has been reeling from one inch of snowfall that completely incapacitated all transport. I have no plans to go out this evening despite being a young person living in a vibrant and exciting city. In fact, my flatmate, who is out at a party just texted me to ask if I wanted to meet up with them, and I turned down her offer. I can't afford to go out and I don't really enjoy getting drunk unlike many of people my age. Instead I will write because this city has forced me into yet another emotional downturn. Even just sitting down to type up this blog post is making my heart race. I'm not surprised - I was diagnosed with severe anxiety months ago; this coming after several years of treatment for major depressive disorder. Tonight I don't want to address the anxiety or the depression directly. They're just hovering in the background while I take this opportunity to address something that I've been denying for quite some time now.
So here goes.
I do not like London.
It feels strange to write that sentence. Of course there will be explanation and it's certainly not a simple fact. But I had to write it. I had to admit it to myself, if only to be able to understand exactly what I mean by it. Of course, I am still learning that changing my physical location doesn't necessarily mean finding happiness or escaping my very real emotional problems. But with every move, every new city, I just can't help but hope. Maybe this time. Maybe this place. Is this where I will reinvent myself?
Sometimes I look around and I just don't believe this is actually my life. How on earth did I end up in London? Don't mistake me - I am not in wonder at unbelievably fortunate circumstances, although there is a slight tinge of this sentiment. Mainly, I am just astounded that my life took this turn. I've written quite a lot about the events leading to the life changes that took place in 2011. Now it seems that I am finally meeting with the consequences. I'm only just beginning to appreciate just how radically different my life is now from what I had always expected it to be. And now we've come to the first mention of the core of my musings this evening - expectations, how/why we create them and what happens when they are destroyed.
I grew up on a horse farm in Maryland. Like any imaginative little girl, I spent my childhood dreaming of far away places. I read so much my parents sometimes had to pull the book from my hand to get me to go play outside. The quiet countryside definitely didn't seem exciting enough to me, especially because nothing fantastical or thrilling ever happened there like it did in my books. This boredom eventually transformed into a sort of wanderlust, specifically a longing for the flurry of people and events that only existed in big cities. When the time came to move away for university, I expected to move to a city where I felt I would be inspired to greatness by the vigor of so many human souls interacting in the cosmopolis. My expectations were foiled and I ended up in a small city in upstate New York (perhaps the least exciting place in all the world, or at least that's what it felt like to me at the time). The fallout from those first dashed expectations was painful and dramatic, so much so that I was impelled to flee to a foreign country.
I can't help but look back on the following course of events and wonder just how much thought I actually gave to them at the time. I wanted to get away - why not study at Oxford for a year? I dreaded returning to university in America - well then I'll just graduate early; I wanted to get away again - fuck it, I'll move to London for my MA. Now here I am. I battled valiantly to get here. I fought with university administration in order to graduate a year early and the final confrontation with the dean left me in tears from frustration (fucking university bureaucracy). Somehow London had become an idealised dream for me. This was intensified by the painful memories that I had come to associate with America as a whole country as well as the intoxicating feelings of falling in love with a British boy.
When I first moved here, I found my flat to be ugly and empty and not the least bit comfortable. My flatmate wasn't due to move in for a month and so I spent weeks on my own, stranded in a strange new city without a single acquaintance. It was a harrowing experience even though at the time I was striving to see it as an adventure. I didn't like hearing the noise of so much human activity outside my window - it was unnerving for a girl who was used to crickets and the occasional cow sounding her off to sleep. I was also suddenly reminded of my old irrational terror of intruders and now it has been renewed with full strength. This fear has been with me for as long as I can remember. I have distinct memories from a very young age of lying awake at night with my eyes glued to the bedroom door convinced that every sound in our creaky house was a murderer moving towards me. I wasn't allowed to watch crime shows like Law & Order for a long time because I once saw an episode about a home invasion that put me into such an awful terror that I refused to shut my eyes for days. For some reason I had never considered how this ingrained fear of intruders would intensify in a big city. I've never really thought too much about this fear - it's the sort of phobia that is easily forgotten in the morning light, but then there are times when it comes back full force and I have to sleep with the light on or call someone to stay on the phone while I fall asleep. If I have such a strong fear of intrusion even in the quiet countryside, how would I ever survive in the city? Well, let's just say my anxiety suddenly became almost unbearable and I could barely sleep when alone in the flat.
After about a month, my boyfriend was home in England from Munich one weekend so we decided to visit his parents in Surrey. They live in a village in the Surrey Hills that is surprisingly rural. Hugh and I went on a long walk through the countryside and I almost felt like crying from relief. I was so happy to be back in nature, surrounded by farms and all of the things I hadn't even realised that I missed. I felt as though I could breathe properly for the first time since moving to London - as though I had been restricting my breathing while in the city with its toxic air imbued with the bodily emissions of the millions of dirty strangers as well as the gases from cars, trains, etc. On that hack through the bridlepaths of Shamley Green, I finally understood why I felt so uncomfortable in London. It was as if my body had been aching for the open air. I had never lived in a proper city before - Syracuse and Oxford are on such small scales that I had never felt constricted or cut off from nature. And I suddenly realised that living in London was very different from visiting. I was supposed to be a Londoner. But I never fell in love with the hustle and bustle of the city. Instead I felt constantly on edge, uncomfortable even living in one of the nicest residential areas of the city.
I'm going to be 23 this year, which makes me a very real "20-something." I was raised on TV and movies about young people living and loving in the city. I guess I should have been reading more of Thoreau, though, because I now find myself living in a city that still feels quite strange even after 4 months. Of course I will be giving London more time, another 9 months to be exact and probably more. I am still planning to stay in England for a gap year before starting my PhD. I am staying for many reasons, but it's not because I love London. I fell in love with Oxford and with the English way of life. I even fell in love with an Englishman. But I have found London to be austere and unrelenting.
My disillusionment with the city, however, is not the most troubling version of this crisis of blighted hope I've been thinking about recently. The little girl, constantly reading and dreaming - she was full of hope. Childlike, naive hope, yes, but still hope. Now, I'm twenty-two and I've graduated from university with honours. I'm living in one of the most dynamic and stimulating cities in the world - home to many of the writers and artists I most admire. But any hope that survives in my life is feeble and fading fast. Is this the natural consequence of growing up? Or is there something peculiar to my life or the timing of my coming of age?
There are many intriguing conversations to be had about this generation of young adults. We have been called the Millennials, a name which seems as though it would carry great hope - the hope of a new millennium. But instead we were told the year 2000 would bring a catastrophe and then we were shocked by terrorist attacks and a long war we never fully understood (and one which we certainly haven't seen culminate with a triumphant victory). We've seen the excess and irresponsibility of the previous generation crush our economic prospects and we've been talked into an educational dream that has saddled us with astonishing, crippling debt. All the while we Millennials have been talking and connecting and documenting our every thought online. But I feel like I've become an empty shell - here I am on the Internet, sharing my voice but its drowned out in the throng and the hope I once had for an exciting life full of success is dashed. Our generation can't live online, blogging and tweeting and constantly scrolling through Facebook and Tumblr. Growing up, I found solace online when I found real life to be too daunting...now, I can't escape real life and I'm looking back on the past four years only to realise that my "adult" life has been nothing but lethargic scrolling, wisps of half-formed hopes never growing to full strength because...well, why bother? Somewhere along the way, I started to believe that real life, wherever its setting - a farm in Maryland or a European city - has never held much real promise.
I remember reading in one of the many recent articles on our (doomed? unpopular? whiny? lucky? the jury appears to be out on how to describe us) generation that only about 14% of recent college graduates expect to be more successful than our parents*. What a dismal statistic. Only 14% of twenty-somethings are hopeful. We have been told to lower our expectations because of the economic downturn. Fair of course, we all are adjusting to a "new normal," but allow us a bit of frustration. Our Boomer parents got us into this mess and we're paying for it with the years of our youth. We will all go on. Despite all of the apocalyptic fiction we've been reading lately, we know it's not the end of the world. We'll find a new ways to define success, but it's quite stinging to have grown up with such excitement and hope only to have it all dashed to hell.
And to top it all off, I'm not even cut out for the misadventures of the likes of Lena Dunham's characters on Girls because I've found the city to be nothing but unpleasant. I suppose I am writing about it, so it has fuelled some sort of creativity, but I'm afraid these ramblings don't constitute the sort of life-affirming art to which I would like to devote my life. Though I've recently bought an edition of Thoreau, so maybe I'll find some hope in it.
*Are Millennials the Screwed Generation? by Joel Kotkin for The Daily Beast
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